There’s a lot of talk today about their having “extended” the deadline to March 31 of next year. I have a clarification in email from Katherine Schelbert:
To clarify, this is not an extension. In this case, this is more of a re-focus. The most recent Dec 31, 2017 date was established as the date by which teams needed to initiate a launch, and was used as a means to down select to the current 5 finalists. Now, what is more important to teams, who all have different mission profiles (and paths to the moon, length of time in orbit) is the deadline by which they need to complete the mission, which is now the only date that matters. This competition is designed to not just inspire teams to launch, but to complete the mission, which is also why we are further incentivizing teams with the in-space Milestone Prizes, which are important achievements that will occur post-launch, on the way to fulfilling the competition requirements.
FWIW.
I think Google needs to either a.) let the prize expire or b.) remove the deadline altogether.
They claim that if it isn’t won by March 31, it will expire.
They claim that if it isn’t won by March 31, it will expire.
Where have we heard that one before?
We’ll see. Amanda is pretty adamant that this is it.
I am not really a fan of changing rules of a competition after it is underway but it is still nice to see that some of these teams get an extension. Even better is that some of the teams planned to go ahead no matter what because they intended from the beginning to exist beyond the contest. Maybe that is what pushed the organizer’s hand.
Depending on how things played out between teams in/out of the competition, it could have looked very bad for the organizers.
“The most recent Dec 31, 2017 date was established as the date by which teams needed to initiate a launch, and was used as a means to down select to the current 5 finalists.”
So Dec 31, 2017 established who is playing. Or one can not decide to start playing now, all that remains is that the 5 finalist have have reach the long stated deadlines or not get prize money..
Could any of the teams that were forced out by the Dec 31 deadline have met the new one?
X-Prize has really went out of their way to demonstrate that prizes don’t work in the modern world. They have exactly zero success of actually kickstarting anything across their entire spectrum of prize ideas.